Scotland

"He was so promising as a student that the priests whose school he attended sent him to Spain with a nobleman whom they knew, so that he might learn still more from travel."

--from Number Stories of Long Ago by David Eugene Smith

Some years ago, I read about the battle of Culloden in a book called Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon. I knew that Bonnie Prince Charlie gathered an army of Scottish highlanders and tried to reclaim the crown of Scotland for the Stuart dynasty. I knew that he had a great many successes in his campaign, leading up to the battle of Culloden. I knew he made some foolish choices on the eve of that battle, and that in the end, the highlanders suffered a bitter defeat that changed the course of history in Scotland. I knew all that.

But then again, I didn’t know.

Last week, I spent seven days on a tour of Scotland that took me into the Scottish highlands and to the Culloden battlefield. I can say without a doubt that my understanding and appreciation of the story of the story of the Jacobite rebellion of 1746 has changed and deepened in ways I could not have imagined.

We arrived in the highlands on a misty morning. We got off the bus and looked out on the beautiful shores of Loch Lomond. The sight was breathtaking. Light fog hung over the mountains. A light rain fell occasionally, making all the vegetation lush and green. The water was still and blue from afar, yet dark and brooding up close. The whole place had an air of mystery and majesty that I can hardly explain.

That was only the beginning of our trip through the highlands. For the next four days, we drove through amazing scenery, through narrow passes, down winding mountain roads, and by misty, glistening lochs. We listened to our tour guide tell us dozens of stories of the legends and history of the region. And I must confess that I completely lost my heart to the Scottish highlands.

I can’t claim to know Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s full motivation for launching his campaign to take back Scotland from the English. But I understand now why so many highlanders chose to follow him. If the Scottish highlands were my home, I would fight to get them back, too. I felt a deep connection to the land after a few days of seeing it through a bus window. These men not only lived there, but also depended on the land for their livelihood. How could they do anything else but try to keep it?

Yet having that new appreciation of the highlanders’ connection to their home made the story of Culloden all that more heartbreaking. We walked out onto Culloden Moor and stood at the location of the front lines of the highland forces. I gazed out across the field and saw in the distance the mountains that had already so captured my heart and imagination. These men stood there looking out on their home.

Then came the order to attack. The battle was lost in less than an hour. A great many highlanders died that day on the field. The rest were hunted down, imprisoned, and massacred for years to come. The ones that survived were not allowed to wear their clan tartans, which were a proud symbol of their heritage.

The entirety of their lives changed that day. I thought I understood that before I went to Scotland. But it wasn’t until I stood on that front line that I really understood.

If I had stood on Culloden Moor without knowing everything I did about the Jacobite rebellion and the highlanders, I don’t think I would have appreciated the magnitude of what happened there that fateful day in 1746. If I had only read about the battle but never seen what the highlanders saw when they stood on the front lines, I never would have been able to really imagine what it was like for them. But the two experiences together made for a heartbreaking, soul-changing moment that will stay with me for a long time.

Nine months ago, when I sat in a piano bar discussing a possible trip abroad with my mother, I started throwing out random destinations – anywhere I had not yet been. Poland, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Turkey. I was willing to go anywhere, sight unseen. But I’m so glad that, in the end, we settled on going to Scotland. Not only did the stories of Outlander come alive for me, but the history behind the stories became real.

At the end of our trip, half of our tour group continued on to do a weeklong tour of Ireland. While a piece of me envied them, another piece of me knew that I would not appreciate Ireland the way I appreciated Scotland. I cried when we left the highlands, and I cried again when we left the country altogether. I had seen what I had come to see, but it was still hard to say goodbye. And I think it would have been, no matter where I had been going next.

I hope I take many trips in my lifetime that give me the kind of experience that Scotland did. There are so many places in the world to go, and who knows which others I will feel compelled to see as my life goes on. For now, I plan to continue to read historical fiction until I feel inspired to go somewhere else. There is much to be learned from travel. But like any teacher, travel will teach you more when you come prepared. 

But no matter where else I go, I hope that someday I return to bonnie, bonnie Scotland.

Pretty

** I am posting one day early to make up for the post being one day late last week. Enjoy. **

“Not for nothing, it also helps to know that feeling bad about your looks is apparently such a universal thing that even little girls who live in isolated Wisconsin cabins (as far as one can get from fashion magazines) can experience it.”

--from The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure

I was lucky enough to grow up in a magnet-school bubble that protected me from adolescent-girl meanness. I never wore fancy clothes or carried name-brand accessories, and for the most part, I wasn’t picked on for it. I may have been jealous of my friend’s Trapper-Keeper or slap bracelet, but I was never made to feel like less of a person for not having one. I never felt ashamed of my clothes or general appearance – at least not as a result of what my peers have said to me.

That being said, I would be blatantly lying if I said that I never struggle with my looks. It’s a rare day when I look in the mirror and I feel more confident for it.

My hair is flat, boring color so nondescript that I’m never sure whether to list my hair color as blond or brown. It’s not quite straight but not quite wavy, which basically means that it looks like a hot mess if I let it air dry or leave it down when I’ll be outside for long periods of time. 

I’ve often wished that I could trade in the entirety of my skin for a new model. I’ve never been able to rid my face entirely of the acne that appeared at age 12. The skin on my nose is permanently 3 shades redder than the skin on the rest of my face, and consequently my nose often shows up bright red in photographs and I’m asked whether I’m sunburned when I haven’t seen the sun for weeks. Exercise makes ugly, rash-like bumps appear on my upper arms. And I have more moles than I’ve ever cared to count. They look ugly when exposed. They leave visible bumps under form-fitting clothes. And they’ve also left me covered with scars of various sizes, shapes, and colors, due to the need to remove at least one a year for precautionary skin-cancer screenings.

I do like the color of my eyes. They are hazel, showing some green, some brown, some gold, and even a thin ring of blue. However, my eyes are chronically dry, so the pretty irises are ringed by nasty red veins that almost never fade.

I could go on, but I won’t. I realize that everything I just wrote puts the worst possible spin on my features. But I was not trying to be objective; I was trying to write an honest account of the things that go through my mind when I look in the mirror. While I’ve never felt self-conscious enough to make me not leave the house, it is a rare occasion when I feel pretty.

I have made some efforts in recent years to feel better about my appearance. I stopped settling for whatever clothes I can get on, and starting putting in the effort to find clothes that fit well and learn which colors and cuts look best on me. I started forcing myself to wear bigger and more colorful accessories, despite the fact that I often feel like they are over the top. I have made periodic attempts at wearing makeup (but that’s one thing I have yet to master, so I’ve never stuck with it for long).  Whenever I get my hair cut, I talk myself into cutting it too short to tie back, so I’m forced to fuss with it and learn what looks nice on me.

These steps have helped in some ways. At the very least, I’ve learned that people who look coordinated and put together aren’t able to do it without some effort. I feel a little more grown up and a lot less guilty about buying things for myself. I’m more confident, and maybe even happier. But as far as feeling prettier? Forget it. I still feel like I’m just doing the best I can with the mediocre hand that I was dealt.

I am quite sure that I am not alone in this. Far from it. But I don’t find that thought very comforting. Actually, it makes me a little sad to think that there are women everywhere who struggle to feel pretty. That idea has led me to think back on the moments when I have felt pretty. Surprise, surprise, I’ve noticed that these moments have something in common. I feel pretty when someone tells me I look pretty.

The fact of the matter is that it is next to impossible to be objective about your own looks. It’s much easier to believe that you look pretty if someone else tells you so. Before all the feminists object, let me say that I don’t think it has to be a significant other. After all, I’ve never had a significant other, and this has worked for me in the past. I never had any kind of romantic entanglement with my late friend Stephen, yet he made me feel pretty all the time. My cousin Kim has a way of complimenting my hair and clothes in ways that sometimes make me feel like I look pretty. Even some stranger on the train complimenting my shoes can make me feel pretty.

While some part of me hates the idea of other people controlling any part of my self-worth, I think there is an alternative way of interpreting this. Maybe the lesson is that it is so, so important to tell someone they look nice when you think it. Make it a point to compliment someone every day. Maybe if we all hear it enough, those feelings of prettiness will have a better chance of becoming intrinsic.

It’s just another way to pay it forward.

Robot

“Sometimes, your eyes see something your brain doesn’t. You pick up a newspaper and your head gives you a phrase that you didn’t consciously read yet. You walk into a room and you realize something’s out of place before you’ve bothered to properly look.”

--from Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

I often feel like I exist in the gray area, career-wise. I work in education, but I am not a teacher. I work in publishing, but I don’t work for a publisher. I don’t work in corporate America, but I’m also not quite in academia. Honestly, I really enjoy this ambiguity. It allows me to dip my toes in several different career ponds without feeling like I am stuck in any of them.

One of the weirdest things about my job, I think, is the way my skills are somewhat divorced from my education. My background is in mathematics and learning sciences, and I do believe that is critically important to being able to do my job well. But my marketable skill set is in editorial. I think of education and editorial as the two, rather separate hats I have to wear in while completing my day-to-day work tasks.

I will freely admit that I wasn’t very good at either aspect of my job when I started. I’ve been able to really refine and develop my ability to think like a mathematics educator through graduate school, attendance at conferences, and simply talking with my colleagues (who happen to be among the best in the field). Almost every day at my job is a professional development opportunity in that sense, and I’m lucky that way.

Appropriate editorial professional development opportunities are harder to come by. There are certification programs I could go through to show that I am proficient with the Chicago Manual of Style, but because I work on materials intended for young children, we mostly work from our own specialized style guide. I am as familiar with the CMS as I need to be. I honestly could not tell you if there are editorial conferences, but even if they are, I doubt that I would find them very useful. The materials that I edit just have too many unusual characteristics about them.

Thus, I have not made much conscious effort to develop my editorial skills over the years. Lucky for me, these skills seem to have developed quite nicely on their own through years of practice.

Most days, I feel like my subconscious does most of the work for me. The kinds of information that I can pick up from a glance at a page of one of our books is really kind of fascinating. Sometimes, I can glance at a page and my eyes are immediately drawn to an error. Other times, I take a quick glance and know that somewhere, there is a hyphen missing, but I have to look again carefully to find where it is. Still other times, I can look at a page and just know that something is not right, though it often takes me some time to figure out what it is.

This phenomenon fascinates me. I have so many questions about it. I’m sure it’s a skill that develops through practice, but did I do something specific to help it along? Is it some sort of photographic memory? Do I actually pick up so much information with a glance at a page that my working memory can’t hold the location of the missing hyphen along with everything else? Why can I instantly see errors on the pages of math textbooks when I can read my own writing ten times and still miss blatant typos?

On a different track, here is another question. How much of it is just a basic survival instinct? The feeling I get when I know something is wrong with a page is similar to the feeling I get when I walk into my apartment and know someone has been there in my absence (or my cat has knocked something down). I can’t always see it right away, but I know that something has been disturbed or moved. It’s the same sense of not-right-ness.

Getting back to the idea of professional development, is this something that could be taught? Familiarity with the thing you are editing is important, of course. Someone who has never seen one of our math books would never be able to sense that something is wrong with a page the way I do. But is the skill generalizable?

Despite how little I know about my ability to sense missing hyphens and incorrect fonts, I am grateful for it. It removes a lot of the tedium from my job. I think of it as my own version of the Lost in Space robot, except instead of saying, “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!” it says, “Error, editor Katie, error!”

My error robot is awesome. I’ve come to think of the Lego robot on my desk as a sort of portrait of him. He’s a great defender of mathematical accuracy and a fierce opponent of bad grammar. I think Stephen would be proud.

Laugh

“A broad, soundless laugh now appeared on his face and no longer left it.”

-- from “In the Penal Colony” in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

While I am generally happy and satisfied with my life, I admit that I am prone to occasional attacks of listlessness. Now and again, I have a bad day or endure a series of small frustrations, and I just can’t shake the blues. I end up sitting in my apartment, staring at a wall, wondering why my life isn’t what I thought it would be by now.

Last Thursday was one of those days. I was sad and lonely for no particular reason, and as I sat on my couch waiting for an appropriate time to go to bed, all I could think was that I wanted, very badly, to laugh.

I’ve always believed that laughter is one of the world’s greatest healers. A good bout of laughing really makes the rest of the world go away. The physical exertion of laughing hard forces the restless feelings out of me. The emotional release of laughing shifts my focus away from the negativity. Laughter is a never-fail, lasting cure for the blues, and the harder and longer I laugh, the better I feel.

So, on Thursday, I was really wishing for a laughing fit. My mind drifted to episodes in my past that left me unable to stop laughing. I hoped that the memory of one of these occasions would trigger me to laugh myself out of my funk.

I thought of the rehearsal for the play during my senior year in high school when we first started using props. One of the characters carried around a doll, believe it to be her dead son. The first time I saw the doll was during a run of the scene when my character was introduced to the doll as if it were a 5-year-old boy. My castmate walked on stage, said, “Mrs. Savage, this is my son,” and held out a doll of Steve from Blues Clues. The giant head, ugly shirt, and buckle shoes were too much for me, and I broke out laughing. The other cast member started to laugh too, and soon enough we were so far gone that the director sent us home. It was not my proudest moment, yet I remember feeling that comforting sense of exhaustion and release that a good laugh brings. (It’s very unlikely that she will ever read this, but I would bet that Disa still remembers this, too.)

I thought of the Easter weekend of my senior year in college, when a friend and I were making a whole chicken for dinner. We were rinsing the chicken in the sink to help thaw it out when, quite suddenly, the giblets came flying out and slid up the side of the sink fast enough to rise to eye level before landing back in the sink with a loud, metallic thump. My friend and I had a complete laughing meltdown that lasted for hours. (You remember, don’t you, Candace?)

I thought of the hayride I went on as an undergrad that unfortunately, occurred on a rainy, windy, cold evening. My friends and I sat hunched under our hoods, feeling the rain soak us through to our skins, hating life, and muttering complaints under our breath. Finally, one unforgettable person, determined to lighten the mood, yelled, “We are having a good time! Everybody just shut up!” The entire wagon dissolved into laughter even as we choked on the rain being blown into our faces. We continued laughing about that moment for years. (I miss you so much, Stephen.)

I thought of the time, shortly after moving to Chicago, that I came home from a bachelorette party feeling more than a little tipsy. One of my roommates was with me and stayed out in the front yard talking on the phone as I walked into the apartment. My other roommate had apparently been doing yoga while we were gone, as there was a large yoga ball sitting in our living room. In my state of inebriation, I apparently could not quite work out what the yoga ball was or why it was there, so I carried it out to the porch and rolled it down the stairs to my roommate, saying, “Look!” We both laughed until tears were rolling down our cheeks.

It was easy to remember plenty of fits of laughter, but the memories didn’t have the effect I was hoping for. I remembered the feelings of euphoria and release, but all I could do was smile or sometimes let out a small chuckle. The real laugh felt somehow trapped inside me, unable to really get out.

It’s been about four days now, and I still haven’t really laughed the way I want to. I’ve tried calling up more memories; that hasn’t done it. I’ve tried forcing myself to laugh harder at things that are only moderately funny; that hasn’t worked either. Perhaps true, gut-wrenching, blues-healing laughter can’t be manufactured. I’m just going to have to wait.

There are other ways to shake off my blues. I can work on the various projects that are laying around my apartment. I can play with my cat. I can get out into the fleeting sunshine, when the sun makes an appearance. I can hold onto that silent laugh trapped inside me and hope that when I do dissolve into laughter again, the experience will leave me contented and worry-less for a while.

I bet it will. And I bet I won’t see it coming. (Look at me! I’m being optimistic!) In the meantime, thanks to all of you who have laughed with me over the years. I remember those moments with a clarity and sentiment I can hardly explain, and I wish you all plenty more moments of suffocating laughter.

Million Billion Trillion

“Instead of thinking about the monkeys I think about all the kids in the world, how they’re not TV they’re real, they eat and sleep and pee and poo like me. If I had something sharp and pricked them they’d bleed, if I tickled them they’d laugh. I’d like to see them but it makes me dizzy that there’s so many and I’m only one.”

--from Room by Emma Donoghue

In my five years of working in the education field, I have learned that most mathematical concepts can be placed on a continuum from easy to teach and learn, to tremendously difficult to teach and learn. The basics of three-dimensional objects, for example, are pretty easy since there are so many good models of three-dimensional solids in the real world. A shoebox is a model of a rectangular prism, a soup can is a model of a cylinder, and so on.

Two-dimensional geometry moves a little way down the continuum toward hard. There are many real-world models of two-dimensional figures, but they all have small problems with them. A piece of notebook paper is a pretty good model of rectangular region, but the paper does have some thickness, whereas a true rectangular region does not. The rails of train tracks are a decent model of parallel lines, but they are never perfectly straight and don’t continue forever. Plus, train tracks appear to get closer together as they move off into the distance, and explaining perspective to a child is not an easy thing to do.

There are ways to overcome these minor difficulties, though. For one thing, children don’t necessarily need to understand all these fine distinctions right away. The real thorns in my side are the concepts that are all the way at the hard end of continuum. One of these concepts is large numbers.

Learning to read and write large numbers is one thing. Once you get past the teens, our numeration system has a predictable pattern. But really understanding what the large numbers mean is much harder.

Instincts about large numbers are not something we are born with. When I was six or seven, I had a Dr. Seuss book called My Book About Me. Each page had blanks to fill in. My name is _______. I am _____ years old. I am _____ feet _____ inches tall. I happily filled in all these blanks, and eventually came to a page that asked me to count the number of steps from my room to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the door, from the door to the mailbox, and from the mailbox to the store. I counted the steps in the first three trips, then stopped. I'm not sure if I just didn't want to walk all the way to the store (which was about a mile down the road) or I thought my mother wouldn't let me, but I didn’t go. Instead, I simply wrote 100 in the blank, assuming that it couldn’t possibly be more than 100 steps. After all, 100 was a huge number.

I eventually learned a better sense of 100. There are many ways to visually compare 1 with 100. There are 100 pennies in two rolls, 100 squares in a 10-by-10 grid, and 100 paper clips in a box. If kids are exposed to comparisons like this (one penny versus two rolls of pennies), they will eventually gain a sense of how much 100 is, and come to understand that maybe 100 is not such a huge number after all. Lord knows that, as an adult, I have learned that $100 is not the fortune it seemed like when I was 7.

There are similar ways to help children gain a sense of 1,000. But what about 10,000? What about 100,000? What about a million? When is the last time you’ve seen that many of anything? I think part of the problem is that even when you do see collections that big, our brains have a hard time processing the individual pieces. There are photographs of crowds of 100,000 people, but when I look at such photos, I don’t see individual people. I see one mass of people. I don’t know if that is true of everyone, but I imagine that it is a common difficulty.

I openly admit that despite the fact that I am 28 years old and I have degrees in mathematics and learning sciences, I still struggle to really understand large numbers. My undergraduate alma mater recently received a $100 million gift. Many alumni were very excited about this, but I have to admit that my response was a blank stare. I don’t really understand what this means for the university. I know that they are going to use the money to open a medical school, but will the $100 cover the whole start-up cost? Will there have to me more fundraisers just to erect the buildings? Will it only take $50 million to first open it, so the rest can be used to sustain the school until it becomes profitable? I haven’t the faintest idea what $100 million will buy.

I also don’t have a clue about the population of the United States or the planet. I have heard the numbers before, of course, but they never stick because I really have no idea what they mean. Before I google it, here are my wild stabs at these populations: There are 3 million people in the United States and 2 billion in the world.

Here are the true populations, according to the census bureau: There are 311 million people in the United States and almost 7 billion on the planet. I guarantee that I will forget these numbers tomorrow, because at the moment my brain is struggling to really understand the difference between my guesses and the truth.

While I understand that my own personal anecdotes are not proof of anything, I relate them to illustrate the kinds of struggles that kids (and the adults they become) will face if they don’t develop a good sense of large numbers. This is, in fact, the kind of math that is used in everyday life, and I wish I had learned it better. And that returns me to my original point: This is a hard thing to teach.

There are some curricula and books out there that make a very good start, but I’m always on the lookout for inspiration for ways we could teach a better sense of large numbers. I often count my steps while I’m running, so maybe I will see how long it takes me to run a million steps (not all in one day, of course). I’m not particularly interested in finding out how long it takes me, but I am interested in finding out if it helps me understand just how much 1,000,000 is.

And if any of you would like to donate $100 million to the cause so that I can see what it takes to spend that kind of money, that would be great too. Thanks.

Canadian

“The restaurant downstairs was still cheap, if you didn’t mind the difference between francs and euros. Three-franc wine was now three euros, which was more than fifteen francs, but Harris was not interested in such mathematical calculations.”

--from “Belons” in Edible Stories: A Novel in Sixteen Parts by Mark Kurlansky

In general, I was a rather tame college student. I didn’t drink at all until I was 21, and even after that my bouts of heavy drinking were few and far between. My Friday and Saturday nights consisted mostly of lounging around my dorm or apartment. I just wasn’t interested in the frat party scene or the bar scene.

But there was one aspect of the college stereotype I was interested in: SPRING BREAK! It wasn’t so much that I wanted to go to Panama Beach and wear a bikini and get trashed, but I did want to get the hell out of town and go on a trip with my friends. I spent the spring break of my freshman year at home with my parents, but after that I was determined to go somewhere for the remaining spring breaks.

This was one goal I actually ended up achieving. However, none of the trips really turned out the way I expected.

When I was a sophomore, six of us piled into my friend Stephen’s dilapidated minivan and made our way down to Myrtle Beach, SC. We had high hopes for beaches and sunshine, and the memories of the drive down there are some of the best of my life. But two things happened when we got there that really put a wrench in the trip. First, turns out that Myrtle Beach is not warm and sunny during the first week of March. The week was rainy, windy, and cold. We got so frustrated that we actually got back in the van and drove to Florida one day. Second, during our first full day there, I caught some kind of Godzilla virus that made me cough until I choked, and most of the time I was barely able to keep my eyes open. While now, looking back, I would not trade my memories of that trip for the world, at the time it was a big let down. I wish I would have enjoyed it more. As it turned out, it was the only trip I would ever take with that group of friends.

When I was a junior, I was studying abroad during spring break. When my friends were on spring break back home, I was in Rome, walking until my feet felt like they would fall off and spending a night in an airport with some random guy doing tai chi. During my own spring break of sorts, I was in Russia, eating last night’s moldy desserts for breakfast and getting ushered into Russian Orthodox Easter services by armed military personnel. Again, I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything now, but they were their own kind of bizarre and not the kind of spring break I had imagined.

So, my senior year came around, and I really wanted to go on a trip. It was complicated, because some of my friends had different spring breaks than me because they were doing teaching internships at the time, and others just couldn’t be away for other reasons. I would not be deterred, though, and I begged three of my available friends to go somewhere, anywhere with me. Somehow, I talked them into driving to Toronto.

I don’t remember a lot of details about what we did in Toronto. The only thing I remember clearly is how much we were annoyed with the process of converting prices from American dollars to Canadian dollars and back. Most places accepted American money, but it was hard to tell if you were getting the right amount of change back. Some places would give you change as if you had paid in Canadian dollars, and since the American dollar was worth more at the time, that was a total gyp. So, it was a constant mathematical battle, and it turned into a running gag.

Every time one of us said something about money, another made a point to say, “Canadian or American?” even if the context made it completely clear what we meant. Then we started asking the same question about any number at all. One person would say, “They said it was a 20-minute wait for a table.” Another would answer, “Canadian minutes or American minutes?” Someone would point out that the next attraction was 10 blocks away, and another would ask if they were Canadian blocks or American blocks. It sounds lame, but it was all extremely funny.

Being college students, stayed at a cheap, dingy hotel. We spent some time in the pool, and we were always the only four people there. The pool was pretty large, and if two people were in the water at one end and the other two were talking on deck at the other end, we had to shout to hear each other. Yet, on the wall, there was a sign saying that the maximum capacity of the pool area was 15 people.

This made no sense, of course. It could clearly fit many more than 15 people with room to spare. So what was the deal? I don’t remember which one of us said it, but I should have known it would come out eventually. “That must mean 15 Canadian people.” And the rest of us answered, “Oh, yes, Canadian.” And we cracked up.

Like I said, I know it’s a stupid joke. Yet, it’s what I remember from the last of the spring break trips I so coveted. It was odd and untraditional the way my other spring breaks trip were, but it created a joke that no one but the people who were there will find as funny as I do. In that sense, I have to believe that the true essence of spring break-ing was accomplished. We got the hell out of town and came back with a gem of an inside joke.

I went on one more spring break trip while I was in grad school. We went to New York City for a day, then on to Montreal. Oddly, I don’t remember any difficulties with conversions on that trip to Canada. Maybe in Montreal, all the numbers were in French Canadian, and that’s why I didn’t notice.

Shut up. I think that joke is hilarious. But I only expect Candace, Matt, and Carl to understand.

Alien

“They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive.”

--from The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

When I was in middle school and high school, I had a science teacher by the name of Mr. Barker. Because I went to an arts and sciences center, I was lucky enough to have three classes with Mr. Barker: earth science in eighth grade, biology in ninth grade, and advanced biology in twelfth grade. I say this makes me lucky because as a teacher, Mr. Barker was truly extraordinary.

His classroom was full of amazing things. There was a tank of hissing cockroaches that we were allowed to pick up and handle any time. There were pipettes of every size and measuring scale and kits for making gels that separated out strands of DNA. There was a polygraph machine and a seismograph and a weather station. Because of his elaborate set-up, Mr. Barker was often on the news talking about some random scientific phenomenon. He was labeled everything from “Local Science Teacher” to “Seismology Expert” when he gave his sound bites. Everywhere around him, there was science, because Mr. Barker was, at his very core, a scientist.

He was also a skeptic; in fact, he was the most emphatic skeptic I have ever known. He took significant amounts of time out of his classes to show us videos that debunked psychics and mind readers. He had us measure the various parts of a pair of scissors and manipulate the measurements until we found patterns, just to see how easy it is to find them. (He made us promise not to be astounded and go off and start a scissors cult.) On his wall was a larger poster of Occum’s Razor: “When you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think of horses before you think of zebras.” It was his mantra.

I quite vividly remember one of the times he got worked up about alien abduction stories. To begin with, he hated, hated, how movies all show aliens to be these greenish, humanoid forms with big heads and big eyes. “Those aren’t that different from us!” he said. (Of course I am paraphrasing here.) “People think these silly descriptions of aliens are so otherworldly and different. So if I described something that had legs that bent in different directions, tasted through its feet, and breathed through its butt, people would say it’s an alien for sure, right? Well guess what? That’s not an alien. That’s an insect!”

If life on other planets exists, he argued, surely we have not begun to imagine the forms it could take. There’s no evidence to suggest such life exists elsewhere in the universe. “But even if it did,” he said, “why would the aliens go to Nowhere, Iowa, beam up Bubba, leave depressions in the crops, and leave?” He did not believe in alien abductions, and he made it quite difficult for his students to believe, either. I haven’t known anyone to be so passionate about anything, before or since.

Mr. Barker’s purpose in all of this, I think, was not so much to make sure that we did not believe in aliens. What he really wanted was for us to use science, not hearsay, to draw conclusions about the world around us. Or, more simply put, he wanted to make sure we thought for ourselves. Once we did that, he was pretty confident that we would discover that he was right about everything else.

Those stories give you an idea of what Mr. Barker was like as a person. Above all else, he was a scientist and a skeptic. Those are the things I immediately remembered when the quote above reminded me of him. Ten years ago, if someone had asked me why I thought that Mr. Barker was a truly extraordinary teacher, I probably would have listed those same things. I do still think his passion for science and truth made me sit up and pay attention, and that’s no small thing. But now that I’ve been a professional in the education field for a few years, I find myself thinking of different ways in which Mr. Barker was different. Three new things renew my belief that he was a world-class teacher.

First, Mr. Barker’s tests were hard. Every student in my math/science program lived in fear of his tests. In fact, the difficulty of the tests turned some students away from his classes altogether. You couldn’t cram for a Barker test. You had to start getting ready for them as soon as you started a new unit. I’m not sure I really understood this at the time, but now I realize that Mr. Barker’s tests were hard because doing well on his tests required not only knowing the material, but understanding it. The questions required some significant thought and problem solving. Nothing was simply regurgitated, and there were definitely never any multiple-choice questions. Mr. Barker taught us things, and then he expected us to apply them. That expectation alone raised the bar and caused me to learn more in his classes than in most others.

(As an aside, I’ll also note that he drew pictures on the board during his tests. They were cartoons meant to depict some person or thing associated with the material on the test. If we could guess what they meant, we got extra credit. I remember him drawing a picture of a large toe and a large letter O, each with faces, handbags, and necklaces. Off to the side, a speech bubble proclaimed that someone’s sisters had arrived. The answer (did you guess?) was my-oh-sis and my-toe-sis, or meiosis and mitosis. Mr. Barker’s ability to come up with these on the fly was a sure sign of his brilliance.)

Second, Mr. Barker did not teach to standardized tests. His advanced biology course was considered Advanced Placement, but the curriculum was heavily focused toward genetics, as this was Mr. Barker’s particular interest, and the lab equipment at the center allowed us to do some pretty amazing things with DNA. Finally, about two weeks before the date of the AP test, he did briefly go over some other topics that would be on the test, but he made it very clear that it would take a lot of outside studying for us to do well. He knew he didn’t prepare us to pass the test, but he didn’t apologize for it. It simply wasn’t important to him—and he didn’t think it should be all that important to us, either. I wish teachers today had the luxury of expressing that attitude to their students.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Mr. Barker treated me the same as any other student. I don’t mean that other teachers pushed me back; I mean quite the opposite. I was an academic star for most of my school life, and almost every teacher I had put me up on some sort of pedestal. I was always the favorite, the one who knew all the answers, the never-do-wrong class pet. But to Mr. Barker, I was just one among many. Being smart and having my homework done were not things to be rewarded. They were just expected.

I studied my butt off for Mr. Barker’s tests. I usually did well, and when I didn’t, I knew it was my fault for slacking. I also studied for the AP biology test, and I managed to barely scrape a passing grade. But even if I hadn’t passed, I would not have traded Mr. Barker’s class for a better score. And I always checked my attitude at the door when I entered Mr. Barker’s classroom, forgetting the pedestal I was usually perched on elsewhere. It wasn’t a conscious choice so much as a necessity. My feet had to be solidly on the ground if I was going to do well.

Now, looking back, I know that these are the things that set Mr. Barker apart as a teacher. He was brilliant, passionate, and dedicated; those things made him an exceptional scientist. But it was his high expectations of everyone and his refusal to be driven by outside forces like school boards and the Advanced Placement tests that made him an exceptional teacher.

Mr. Barker retired the year I graduated high school. He absolutely deserved the rest, but I can’t help but feel sorry for the students who came after me. Still, I know there are other teachers out there to are great the way Mr. Barker was great. Someday, if I have children, I hope they have teachers like Mr. Barker.  He was an alien of his own sort, and I’m grateful that I got to be one of the Bubbas that Mr. Barker beamed up.

Twenty-eight

“I lay back down on the bed and crossed my arms behind my head, staring at the ceiling as if I expected it have all the answers. Not surprisingly, the ceiling refused to divulge any hints, although I became convinced that it was simply being selfish and keeping them to itself.”

--from “Alpha Team Alpha” by Stephen Hentchel

Dear Stephen,

Happy birthday! I wanted you to know that I was thinking of you on your birthday, even though… well, I won’t even say it. I’ll always be thinking of you on your birthday.

I wasn’t sure of the best way to let you know that. I considered driving to Battle Creek to see you, but it just didn’t feel right. Instead, I spent the weekend doing things that remind me of you. I went to the zoo. I drank a Smirnoff Ice while watching a DVD with the commentary on. (They seem to have stopped making the black cherry Smirnoff, which makes me really sad. I got the new passion fruit kind instead. It’s not as good.) I even went to the Bittersweet bakery. You know, the one you wanted to go to on New Year’s Day that time? It’s pretty awesome in there. Sorry we didn’t go when you wanted to.

I also went for a long run outside, hoping you would come to visit me like you did back in January. I think I might have felt you again on that stretch of the path between Balbo and Monroe. Was it you? Why do you like that spot in particular? I can’t blame you, I suppose, especially on a bright sunny day. The lake sparkles and there are no trees to block the sun.

It was so, so windy while I was running, though. I have to ask: was that your doing? I don’t know why, but I feel like you have some control over the weather. I still think you are responsible for that torrential downpour that V and I drove through on the way to your funeral. I wouldn’t be surprised if that icy, ever gusting wind was your handiwork as well. I know you would find my suffering hilarious. It was you, wasn’t it? Jackass.

I don’t know; maybe thinking you control the weather is my coping mechanism. Maybe it’s not you at all. Maybe it’s just me being a tiny bit crazy. I’m still trying to figure this whole thing out. I don’t really understand where you are. You’re still so real and alive and vibrant in my mind and heart that my brain can’t comprehend the idea that you are not anywhere. You have to be somewhere. I tend to think that the somewhere is above me, in a general sense. I look up to talk to you. And I look to the sky for the weather. So you controlling the weather is something that makes sense to my troubled mind.

What else can you do? Can you internet surf? I hope you’ve been reading your facebook wall. There are so many people that love and miss you, Stephen. The best I can hope is for you to somehow know that. So, I believe you can control the weather, and I’m also choosing to believe that you can read your facebook wall. If that makes me a little crazy, so be it.

I wanted to watch My Fair Lady this weekend. We watched it on VHS that time, and sadly I got rid of all my VHS tapes last summer. So, I had to go looking for the DVD. No luck at Target, no luck at Borders, and no luck at the first Best Buy I visited. What is wrong with these stores? Don’t they know that My Fair Lady is a classic? After some online searching I found a copy at a different Best Buy across town. When I went to pick it up, I found the cutest little coffee shop! So thanks for getting me out into a new neighborhood. I will always think of you when I go into Peet’s Coffee. (Guess what else? The My Fair Lady DVD has an audio commentary! I haven’t watched it yet, but I’ll let you know if it’s good.)

I also put together a badass Lego robot this weekend. It’s no Yoda, but he’ll go on my desk at work and remind me of you every day. He’ll stand right next to my Lego model of Lucius Malfoy accidentally giving Dobby a sock. (Yes, I have one of those. Shut up.) Check him out:

I wish I could call you to wish you a happy birthday. I think I’ve done that every year since the WMU days. I’m trying to remember all your birthdays past, now. The memory of your 20th birthday is a great one. If I’m not mistaken, that’s when we went to see The Core. Surely you remember how we bonded over that movie? “Augh! One is not a prime number! AUUUUGHHH!” Nothing has ever brought us together like bad math.

Well, I take that back. Bad English also brought us together. It was my bad grammar that led to our last phone call. Remember? You just had to point out that I should have said “Me, neither” instead of “Me, either.” I’m glad you did, though. It was so great to talk to you that day. Thank you so, so much for being so impressed that I had run 20 miles that morning and that I would be running a marathon three weeks later. So many people congratulated me, but something about your reaction was so genuine that I will never forget it. You were truly impressed. It won’t be this year, and it may not even be next year, but I promise that someday I’m going to run another for you. And it’ll probably hurt just as badly, so you better damn well be with me every step of the way. I know you will be.

So how do birthdays work, where you are? I bet that you’ve been thinking to yourself this weekend how awesome it is that you get to eternally remain your devastatingly handsome, in-Navy-shape, 27-year-old self. Well, let me just burst that bubble right now. I don’t care what reason and logic say. To me, today you turn 28. And each year on your birthday, I will close my eyes and picture how you would look a year older. Be good, and I promise that you will age gracefully. But if I feel you laughing at me too many times, you may be a candidate for premature baldness and liver spots. You’ve been warned.

I feel like I could talk to you forever, Stephen, but some piece of my heart is telling me that it’s time to end this. Tears are coming to my eyes. So much about this is unfair. You should be celebrating today, feeling what it is like to be 28. You’re 28 on the 28th today. You should be on the phone with everyone you know, gloating over your golden birthday, and insisting that you get to celebrate when it’s your birthday in any time zone. Instead you are… somewhere else. I don’t know where. But somewhere.

I wanted to get you something. I can’t send you the Lego robot, unfortunately, so I thought I’d write you something. I’ve never been much good at fiction (and I wouldn’t want to steal your forte anyway), so I’m trying something different. Here is your birthday Haiku:

Ode to Stephen

Stephen Hentchel was a guy
who I met at Western Mich.
He was a jackass.

Still, he was a friend,
always good for a laugh and
loyal to a fault.

We fought sometimes, too.
Oft in jest, but oft for real,
though never lasting long.

He sat with one knee up,
slept with his head on his arm,
and drove a minivan.

He loved bare necklines.
He made me feel so pretty
like no one else has.

He hugged me so tight
when I saw him the last time.
I’m so grateful now.

Hearts broke when he died
and today we feel his loss
all over again.

Still I am quite sure
that wherever he is now
he is milking this.

And he is with me.
Now and then I feel him laugh.
I love you, Stephen.

I will always be thinking of you, Stephen. Not just on your birthday. You are everywhere I look, and you remain so alive in my memories that most days I have a hard time remembering that you are gone. You are somewhere. I know it. And I’ll never stop wondering where that is and how you are.

I miss you madly, love you deeply, and am with you always.

Also, I hate you. So much.

Hugs, Stephen. Happy birthday. Give ‘em hell, for me.

Katie

Spirit of Law

“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? … Is it the intention of law-makers that good men shall be hung ever? Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit?”

-- from “A Plea for Captain John Brown” in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau

I am not a politically minded person. While I do my best to stay abreast of what is going on in the world and in my local community, I outwardly admit that most conversations about politics go completely over my head. I am aware that there are nuances and details and jargon related to politics that I don’t understand. I also know that I could understand better, if I put in a little effort. Yet I don’t usually bother.

In many cases, my reasons for not bothering are simple lack of interest or laziness. But part of the problem is also that when I do put in the effort to understand what is going on, I am left repeating Thoreau’s lament above. He says, “Are judges to interpret the law according to the letter, and not the spirit?” I say (somewhat less eloquently), “Wait, seriously?”

A recent and perfect example of this was Rahm Emmanuel’s effort to persuade the courts that he met the residency requirements to become mayor of Chicago. The basics of the situation were as follows: Rahm Emmanuel was a long-time resident of the city of Chicago. When Obama was elected president, Rahm accepted an appointment to be Obama’s chief of staff. He and his family moved to Washington D.C. He later left the chief of staff post so that he could run for Chicago mayor, and moved back to Chicago a few months before the election. While he was in Washington, he rented out his house in Chicago.

There is a Chicago law that states a residency requirement for those who wish to run for mayor. The law says that a mayoral candidate must have lived in the city of Chicago for at least one year leading up to the election. The only exception stated in the law is for active duty military personnel; if an active member of the military resides in Chicago before service, then lives elsewhere on military service, then immediately returns to Chicago after service, the time spent elsewhere still counts toward the residency requirement.

It seems cut and dried, at first glance. Rahm did not live in Chicago for a full year leading up to the election, and he is not a member of the military. So, no mayoral bid for Rahm, right? Not exactly. Two things made the situation more sticky.

First, Rahm argued that while he was not an active member of the military, he left Chicago for the sole purpose of serving his country, with every intention of returning afterward. He still owned a home here. He left possessions in his house. He’s said for years that he wanted to run for mayor. He never left the city for good.

Second, there is the question of the definition of being a resident. While I can’t find anything official that gives a definition, the general idea being spouted by the news was that you just have to have a legal address here. No need to actually live at the address. If that’s true, it seems that Rahm could have indeed met the requirements, given that he owns a home within the city limits. But, he rented out said home, and thus the address was not legally his.

This is the point where I got really annoyed with this situation. This was the major point of contention? The fact that he rented out his house? Everything would be ok if he was not collecting rent from someone? Wait, seriously?

I really wanted people to get out of the word by word text of the law and try to think about the reasons it was made a law in the first place. The idea, I would think, was to make sure that all the mayoral candidates knew the city and were committed to Chicago. I believe that is true of Rahm Emmanuel. Even his opponents would be hard pressed to argue that he doesn’t have a long-standing connection to this city.

And what’s more, the writers of the law even took into account that there are service-related reasons that could pull someone away from the city temporarily. The most common of these reasons would be military service, and I imagine that is why the law reads the way it does. Should the writers of the law have taken into account the remote possibility that a potential mayoral candidate would serve as the one-and-only chief of staff to the president? I guess, maybe. But I have to believe that the spirit of the law was to make exceptions for those who leave to serve the country.

The question of Rahm’s residency went through court after court after court. He was approved to go on the ballot, then the decision was overturned, then he was approved again. Rahm ended up on the ballot. Regardless of my opinions of Rahm’s agenda, which I won’t even bring up here, I think this was the right choice. It followed the spirit of the law, if not the exact words.

I return now to the fact that I am not all that politically minded, so I am aware that there may be some flaws in my arguments above. But my point was not really to argue for Rahm Emmanuel. All I’m saying is that I’m with Thoreau. I’d like to hear some more common sense coming out of the mouths of lawyers and politicians. While I understand that the laws are all that we have to go on, I also think it’s important to remember that law-makers won’t always be able to anticipate every situation to which the laws might apply in the future.

I would also like to say, for the record, that I think the editorial style guide that we use at work should be interpreted with the same flexibility and common sense. But that’s another story, for another blog.

Cousins

“Danny is as near to a brother as I ever had, same age and growing up, same weight and strength. … In childhood I can remember no picnic, no circus, no competition, no Christmas without Danny beside me as close as my own right arm.”

- from The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

When I was growing up, my group of friends changed constantly. I haven’t been in consistent touch with anyone from my childhood, and I’ve often thought that it is sad that I don’t have any lifelong friends. But lately, I’ve realized that I’m wrong about that. I may not have school or neighborhood friends that have been around consistently since my childhood, but always, always, there have been my cousins.

I refer mostly to my mother’s side of the family. My mom has two sisters and a brother, so there are four of them in all, and there are seven of us cousins. I don’t have many non-school-related memories of when I was young that don’t involve at least a few of them.

First, of course, there was always my sister, Laurie. We’ve had difficulties in our relationship at certain points, but we had our share of fun together, too. Christmas Eve was always a big event. We’d spend several days prior planning out a list of activities we would do during the night on Christmas Eve, as we obviously were not going to sleep. We’d camp out in my sister’s room (she had the bigger room, but I’m not bitter…) designing 10-foot Christmas trees and making up alternative lyrics to Christmas carols. Until about 11pm, when I fell asleep. I have a feeling that Laurie was usually up much later.

One of my mom’s sisters, Judy, lived about a 10-minute drive from us. We spent many an afternoon and weekend at Aunt Judy and Uncle Don’s house with our cousins, Kim and Mike. I often refer to Kim as my first friend. We are almost exactly the same age, and we were friends almost since birth. It was always fun for me to hang out with Kim. She was the epitome of 7- to 13-year-old cool. She had a sit-n-spin, and a trampoline, and a NKOTB sleeping bag. And most of the time, she was willing to share those things with me. Kim has always known what she wanted and almost always made it happen. She’s had her life planned out since age 8. I can remember listening to her tell me what her wedding would be like, how old she would be when she had her first kid, everything down to the last detail.

This was all bewildering to me at the time, but now I regret not taking notes. Kim is now 28 and has everything she said she would: a husband, a child, a house, a doctoral degree, and a career. I don’t know how she does it, but I am proud of my first friend and I aspire to learn to make things happen for myself the way she does.

Mike is Kim’s younger brother. Even though he is a couple of years younger than us, and a boy, he was often forced (or bored enough) to play with us. What I remember most about Mike on those afternoons is that he was always willing to take all the crap roles. We’d pull each other around the driveway in a wagon, pretending that one of us was a king or queen in a carriage, one of us was an attendant walking alongside, and one of us was the horse pulling the carriage. Mike would take his turn as the horse, then we’d stop to change roles, and somehow Mike would end up being the horse again. He always took whatever cards he was dealt and didn’t complain much, so long as we agreed to pretend that his name was Bo. (He had a weird fascination with the name Bo.)

Later on, I always appreciated that Mike stayed interested in things like my school plays. He came with my aunt to see me play the lead when I was a senior. He even told me afterward that he liked it (though he also criticized my dart throwing). Mike is now all grown up and much taller than me, though he remains “little brother Mike” and a head shorter than me in my mind. He still takes a lot of the crap – his wife and I poked a lot of fun at him when I saw him a few days ago – but he’s made his own way. He remains one of the most likeable people I know.

My mother’s brother, John, lived in the next city over. John and my Aunt Tina have one daughter, Jennifer. My childhood memories of her are not as strong, mostly because she was a good bit older than us and not so much interested in being pulled in a wagon or listening to NKOTB. She always seemed a little bit larger than life. I can remember going to one of her swim meets once. I was sitting next to Kim, and Jennifer walked up to us in her swimsuit and swim cap. We just stared at her. “It’s me, guys!” she said, but it didn’t seem possible that we knew someone big and important enough to actually be swimming. I know Jennifer a little better now, and she’s fun to talk to and has two sons that are fun to watch and play with. But back then, Jennifer was someone I thought I would never be old enough to be like.

Now and again, we’d venture across the state to visit the third sister, Janice. Jan and Garry’s older son is Josh. Josh is just a year older than Kim and me, so the three of us would kind of congregate at family gatherings. Because he was older, and he was a boy, and he lived farther away, I think Josh felt left out of the circle sometimes. He was bigger and stronger and faster than us and tended to always win every game. When winning got boring, he would make trouble instead. This often took the form of stealing something from one of us and refusing to give it back, or telling on his brother. When trouble started, you wanted Josh on your side.

The troublemaker side of Josh still lives on. He’s still a big joker, though the jokes are not so mean any more. But the always-the-winner Josh is the one I still see the most often. He casually wins all the 5Ks he enters and starts training for another Ironman race less than a year after finishing the first one. Yet he is completely supportive of those of us (read: me) who are just happy to finish a triathlon or a marathon. I’ve grown to really appreciate that about him.

Last but not least, there is Kyle. Kyle is Josh’s brother, and was always the little one. The kid definitely knew how to use that to his advantage, though. I can remember one time that we were allowed to go down into Josh and Kyle’s basement. We each got to choose a bottle of pop. (A rare treat – Aunt Jan and Uncle Garry had pop in glass bottles!) Kyle downed his immediately, and then started asking for sips from ours. Josh warned me not to give him one, because he’d drink the whole bottle. But Kyle worked his aren’t-I-little-and-cute routine on me, and I handed over the bottle. He downed the whole thing. I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

Kyle was always a ridiculously early riser. If he had not accomplished at least three things by 10am, he would say the day was wasted. He’d be outside and working on something before the rest of us even opened our eyes. He maintains his lead on all of us, even today. He leapfrogged the rest of us, in a way; he had two kids before most of us had any.

These are my cousins. Fixtures of my childhood and my only true lifelong friends. I have so many memories with all of them. When we were young, we had a cottage by the lake somewhere in northern Michigan. At least once per summer, we would all go up there together. We would anxiously watch the thermometer until the exact moment it hit 70 degrees, because that’s when we were allowed to go swimming. We would ride along the dirt roads in a golf cart singing “Do-Wah-Diddy.” We’d beg my dad or my Uncle Don to take us across the lake in the speedboat to the store where we could get push-ups and ring pops. We’d sit in the screened porch playing the board games that were stored in the hall closet with the huge wooden door.

There was one bedroom – the brown room – that had 6 beds in it: a double bunk bed and a single bunk bed. Kim and I would sleep on the top double, Mike and Kyle on the bottom double, Josh on the top single, sometimes Laurie on the bottom single (until she graduated to another room and/or got sick of us). One of the adults would read us a story from The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss. We’d listen as they read off all the names that Mrs. McCave wished she’d given her sons, and we’d all hope that we weren’t the unlucky one to be called Oliver Bolliver Butt.

On the fourth of July, we always had Olympics. We’d do sack races other silly events and proudly wear our cardboard medals. (Josh always got the most golds.) It was so interesting to me to watch a video of the Olympics years later, because the video showed me struggling to keep up, often coming in last. This isn’t surprising really, seeing as I remain completely unathletic to this day and also spent much of my early childhood a bit behind the curve due to being an extreme preemie. But the funny thing is, I don’t remember being last. They must have occasionally let me win.

The cottage was sold years ago, and for that and many other reasons, I don’t see my cousins as often any more. For quite a while, our one yearly fixture was our Thanksgiving football game. We’d run around Jan and Garry’s front yard, sort of tossing the football around, but mostly trash talking each other. What I loved most about the game was that everyone played together. Even me, who can’t throw, catch, or run in a straight line. Josh and Mike would try to invent plays that I could handle, and never get mad when I failed miserably at them.

The game evolved over the years to accommodate significant others that came and went and small children that came along. As more and more of the babies come along, I have a feeling that the football game will fade away. But if it does, I’m also sure that something will come along to replace it.

There weren’t a lot of constant friends in my childhood. But always, always there were my cousins. And always, always there will be my cousins.

Those Girls

“Take Sissy. She was bad. But she was good. She was bad where the men were concerned. But she was good because wherever she was, there was life, good, tender, overwhelming, fun-loving and strong-scented life. He hoped that his newly born daughter would be a little like Sissy.”

-from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

I am socially awkward. That is an abrupt way to begin a blog post, but to begin with such a blunt, uncomfortable statement seems appropriate, given the topic. The fact is, I have a very hard time keeping up a conversation with strangers, and sometimes even with people I know well. I enjoy being around people, but I am usually quite satisfied to sit and listen. Coming up with interesting things to say can often feel like a lot of work to me.

This has always been true for me, as far back as I can remember. I remember feeling an odd mix of excitement and fear each time I started at a new school or went to a new camp. There would be others who didn’t know each other, I thought, and maybe this time someone would pick me out of the crowd to be her friend. But it always ended the same. The camp would start, groups would form, and while most anyone would allow me to hang around, I was never really in the inner circle. I was just watching from the fringes. It was not that I was bullied or shunned. I was simply ignored.

For years, I struggled to understand why I couldn’t be one of those girls. You know the type, right? They are the girls who are instantly comfortable in any situation in which they find themselves. They bubble over with fun stories, infectious laughter, and interesting ideas. Every other girl instantly wants to be friends with these girls. They are like magnets. I guess the simplest way to put it is that they are popular.

I really tried to emulate the popular girls, particularly when I was in elementary school. (You know, before “popular girl” became synonymous with “bad girl.”) I did the very best I could to be outgoing and talkative. But I just never held anyone’s interest for long. Deep down, I felt so full of life and wanted to share that. I wanted to laugh and tell stories and entertain people. I wanted to be one of those girls. But I just couldn’t do it. I always ran out of things to say too soon. I came to think of myself as dull.

I don’t mean to imply that I never had any friends. That is not true at all. But I was certainly never popular. I always found my niches, but my feelings of social dullness and mediocrity became so ingrained that I felt like I blended into the background no matter what I did. To some degree, that was the truth. I was the lead in the school play; I was the drum major of the marching band; I was valedictorian of my class. Still, at least 75% of my high school graduating class had no idea who I was. I just wasn’t memorable.

By the time I left for college, I had given up on the idea of ever being one of those girls, but I did still entertain thoughts of being friends with them. I lived in the dorms when I was a freshman, and each floor tended to function as a sort of unit, similar to a school class or a group of campers. Those girls identified themselves quickly, and I tried, equally quickly, to introduce myself to them and become a part of their circle. I failed miserably at it. At the end of the first week, one of those girls came around and asked the entire floor whether they would like to go in on a pizza order. The entire floor, except for me. I don’t think she left me out intentionally. She just forgot. But at the time, that did not really make it any better.

I found my niches, again, eventually. I started going to church. I joined the marching band. I made friends with whom I am still close, to this day. As my world got bigger, the group of people I interacted with got correspondingly bigger, and there was no longer a popular group. I forgot all about those girls.

Still, sometimes I remember those feelings of dullness and invisibility. In certain situations, it all comes back in a rush. I remember a class discussion in graduate school that really got me thinking about it again. We read a section of The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell that contained a small test. There was a long list of surnames, and the idea was to read through it and count the number of names that belonged to someone you know. It didn’t have to be a close friend, but you had to have actually met the person. If your count was high enough, you were considered a “Connector,” and therefore someone who could take a small idea and help it catch on.

I scored quite well on the test. I went to a large high school, then a reasonably large undergraduate university where I was involved in several organizations. Then, I spent a year working for a large corporation. I had met a large number of people, and I usually remember a lot of names. According to the test, I was a Connector. However, I told my class that I really believed I was an exception to the rule. I know a lot of people, I said, but they don’t know me.

I have no idea how my professor or the rest of my class responded, but I do remember one of my classmates telling me later that she was surprised I felt that way. She apparently spoke of me often to her boyfriend, because when he came to visit, the first question he asked when they came to a program barbeque was, “Which one is Katie?”

I’m not sure how to end this post. I would love to say that the story above changed my mind, and that it taught me that I’m not dull and socially inept after all. But, that’s not true. I still struggle with this, and still wonder why I still get left on the fringes when groups form. I guess the important question to ask is not why it happens, but why it matters so much to me. I have a lot of good friends and it’s not that I feel completely isolated. And sometimes, I do seem to manage to make myself appealing and memorable. Why do I care that when I’m on a trip with a big group, I end up spending most of my free time by myself?

I suppose it’s because I spend a lot of time alone, anyway, since I live by myself. And I really do like to spend time around people, so I wish I know how to take better advantage of my opportunities in that sense.

All I can do is try again tomorrow.

Stuck

“Adeline knocked lightly on the bedroom door and pushed it open. Rose was sitting in the window seat, attention focused on the ground below. Her arms were so frail, her profile so gaunt. The room had grown listless in sympathy to its owner, cushions flat, curtains sagging in despondence. Even the air seemed to have staled within the streams of weak light.”

--from The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton


At some point during my first year in Chicago, I suffered a terrible heartbreak of the romantic kind. The details are not important. Just suffice it to say that I lost both a friend and a hope for the future, and I took it hard. It was several weeks before I felt like life started to look up again.

I lived with roommates at the time. Many months (maybe even years) later, one of my roommates told me that my heartbreak had an effect on her, too. “You could just feel the sadness as soon as you walked into the house,” she said. I never sensed this at the time, perhaps because my own sadness just kind of followed me around. But I’ve thought a lot about that comment since then.

Physical spaces have a way of reflecting the nature and moods of the people that inhabit them. For example, every time I walk into my parents’ house, it seems the same and yet somehow different. Eventually, I’ll spot a new wall decoration, or a new paint color, or a new rug. My parents’ house gives off a feeling of familiarity while still changing enough to always feel well put together and new. This is the same way I would describe my mother. On the other hand, the basement of my parents’ house, which mostly functions as my dad’s workshop, is clean, efficient, and cleverly organized, but unadorned. This is just how I would describe my father.

It seems like this effect might simply be due to the fact that the dwellers in a space choose the layout, colors, and furnishings. But is it more than that? Can a space adopt a person’s mood without the person intending it to do so? After all, my house got sad when I was sad. And I can still remember the feeling of my grandfather’s apartment after he passed away. The only word that could describe it was “lifeless.”

Being a mathematician at my core, I can’t help but look for a pattern here. It seems to me that the positive vibes like newness and efficiency are the result of intentional changes made by the dweller, while negative vibes like sadness are adopted without any specific action. I’m really not one to say arty, hippie things like “Rooms are alive!” so I think there must be some other explanation for the negative half. Inanimate objects don’t just change on their own, so what’s the real deal?

I think perhaps it is that negativity is self-perpetuating. When someone enters a period of sadness, things initially get a little drab because people don’t tend to clean or spruce up their living spaces while they are unhappy. Then, because the space around them starts to look shabby, they just stay sad. Eventually the surroundings seem to have changed to match the mood. But really, it’s the space influencing the mood, not the other way around.

Over the past few years, I’ve felt a little stuck. I love my job and I love Chicago, and yet I can’t help feeling sometimes that not much has changed for me over the last five years. I still don’t really feel like I’ve been out of college a long time. I certainly don’t think of myself as an adult. I’m just still in that awkward transition phase between the formative college years and the time when I really feel like my life has a direction. I’m just… stuck. And I want to be unstuck.

Oddly enough, getting a new set of bathroom towels gave me an idea of how I might start to get unstuck. For my birthday last month, my mother bought me a new shower curtain and towels for my bathroom. I put the new things up, and the small room looks completely transformed. It looks grown up and put together. It looks how I want to feel.

After realizing this, I looked around at the rest of my apartment. The blankets on my bed are made of t-shirts from high school and college. The couch in my living room is a loveseat that was in my parents’ house for several years while I was in college. The dishes in my kitchen are the same ones that my grandparents used at a cottage that was sold years ago. No wonder I feel like I haven’t moved on. Much of my apartment is still stuck in the past. It’s another case of the space perpetuating a negative vibe.

So, now I’m on a mission to set aside some money each month and buy my own things to replace the ones that have me stuck in the past. A bedspread first, maybe. Then dishes and perhaps eventually a full-length couch. I’ll choose things that reflect the positive, grown-up vibes I want to feel. Hopefully then, I feel like I’m able to get unstuck.

Smarten Up

“’She loathes me. I was plastered one night and I let slip my pet name for her, Medusa. She was quite flattered for a while. I suppose the poor girl had Medusa mixed up with Minerva or possibly Mnemosyne. It was just my bad luck to have her proudly repeat what I’d called her to someone who knew a smattering of mythology.’ He sighed and finished his drink. ‘She was most upset.’”

--from Ocean’s 11 by George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell

A year or so ago, I started to believe that I was not very well read. Although I do a good amount of reading, I really have not read many books that are considered classics. Too often, I would come across some reference to a classic novel and have absolutely no idea what it meant.

Heathcliff? Isn’t that a cat? I would think to myself. Eventually I picked up that Heathcliff was actually a famous character from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and then I was at least able to smile and nod at references to him. But I still didn’t really understand what was being said. I can also remember wondering where the country of Gatsbia was, because there were a few times when people referred to situations as Gatsbian. Later, of course, I realized that they were referring to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, though learning that fact didn’t tell me any more about what it meant to be Gatsbian.

I tried to remedy this situation on my own, for a while. I read Wuthering Heights. Although I understand references to Heathcliff now, I would almost like to go back and not understand them, as I think Wuthering Heights earns a place on the “Worst Books Ever Written” list. I read The Great Gatsby with better results. I actually enjoyed that one, and am eagerly waiting for an opportunity to use the word “Gatsbian.”

Interest renewed, I tried to think of other classic books I had heard referenced in the past. For some reason, my mind settled on Atlas Shrugged, because there was some association in my brain between that book and feminism. I’m interested in women’s issues, so I thought I would give it a try.

Lucky for me, I mentioned this quest to my sister, Laurie, as we drove home from Thanksgiving last year. Being infinitely well read herself, she informed me that Atlas Shrugged was actually the opposite of feminist. She predicted that I would hate it. I believed her.

While I still wanted to get more classic novels into my repertoire, I was not interested in reading books I would hate. Since I was batting one for three for choosing classics I would enjoy, I decided I needed some help. I asked Laurie if she would, for my Christmas gift last year, gather some classic books that she thought I would like.

Boy, did she ever deliver. While I have not actually counted them, I think it’s safe to say that she got me over a dozen books. I’ve been working my way through them since just after the holidays. Most of the quotes I’ve been using for this blog since Christmas have come from those books. When I read the quote above from Ocean’s 11, I was reminded of why I wanted to do this in the first place. I thought I’d take this chance to assess how the project is going.

My first pull from the box of books was Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Kudos to Laurie in the sense that I really loved this book. It was hysterical. The main character is a reluctant academian, and I think he is exactly what I would be like if I were to enter academia. He sees all the pomp and self-importance of the other lecturers as absurd. He thinks all the things that I think, but would never say out loud. So, home run on the enjoyment. However, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a reference to this book or its author, so it hasn’t made me feel much more cultured. That could change any day, though. For all I know, I’ve heard lots of references to this book and promptly forgotten them because I didn’t understand their significance.

Next up was The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. This is where I had my first, “Oh man, thank goodness for my sister because I’ve been so stupid up until now” moment. I tried to watch the recent Sherlock Holmes movie a couple of times and it simply did not hold my interest. I tried to figure out why, and eventually realized that I felt like the characters had been done before; I felt like I had already seen the movie before on dozens of episodes of House. I wrote the movie off as ripping off the characters and relationships from a popular TV show as a way to give an old story a new spin.

Then I read this book of Sherlock Holmes stories, and realized that the movie was actually an accurate depiction of how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his characters. I started to think harder about it. Hmm, I thought. Holmes, House… Watson, Wilson. Oh crap, I’m an idiot. Holmes and Watson came first! The movie was not a rip-off of the TV show. The TV show was a reinterpretation of the book characters. I’m so glad I read this book. I have a new appreciation for both Holmes and House, now.

Third out of the box was a book of short stories by Henry James. The bulk of the book was taken up by a story called “The Turn of the Screw,” but there were three other lesser-known stories included, too. None of the stories completely blew me away, but I did enjoy how they all dealt with difficult issues – defying over-controlling parents, jealousy in relationships, parents leaving their children to be raised by nannies – while staying solidly in the realm of creepy ghost stories. I don’t know how many times I’ll hear or make references to the specific stories. However, I have a solid sense of Henry James’s writing style now, which is a good thing since before this I would not have known Henry James from O. Henry.

The last book I’ve been able to make my way through is Ocean’s 11. The book’s cover proclaims it to be “a novelization of the hilarious film.” When I read the book, I had seen the modern, George Clooney / Brad Pitt version of the film, but not the Frank Sinatra / Dean Martin version on which the book was based. Still, I expected to find a familiar story. I was shocked to find the book to be a dark and brooding exploration of the relationships among the eleven men involved in the casino heist. Danny Ocean’s inner dialogue reveals him to be a self-absorbed, cowardly jerk who you have to hate. The other men agree to his plan out of misguided loyalty. And in the end, (spoiler alert!) nine of the eleven men are dead.

This was definitely not what I expected. Curious, I watched the Sinatra/Martin version of the movie to see how the book matched up. Plot-wise, the book and the original movie are almost an exact match. But the movie lacks all the brooding and complicated relationships. The story, as the movie tells it, is hilarious. Who knew the novelization would be so different?

I can’t honestly say that I expect the three versions of the story to come up in casual conversation. But if it does, I will have a leg up on all you poor fools who have only experienced one version!

All in all, I’m pleased with my forays into these literary classics. Thanks, Laurie, for smartening up your not-so-book-smart sister.

Valentine

“It was a cramped, steamy little place where everything seemed to have been decorated with frills or bows. Harry was reminded unpleasantly of Umbridge’s office.

‘Cute, isn’t it?’ said Cho happily.

‘Er… yeah,’ said Harry untruthfully.

‘Look, she’s decorated it for Valentine’s Day!’ said Cho, indicating a number of golden cherubs that were hovering over each of the small, circular tables, occasionally throwing pink confetti over the occupants.”

--from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling

I had a different quote and a different topic picked out for today’s post. I was not going to write about Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t that I was stubbornly refusing to acknowledge it. I just kind of forgot about it. It happens almost every year with me.

I can’t help but be aware that it’s the Valentine’s Day season, what with the giant displays of candy in the stores and plethora of annoying jewelry commercials on TV. (Seriously, is there a self-respecting woman on this planet that does not hate that jewelry commercial where the woman cringes into her boyfriend’s/husband’s arms to hide from a thunderstorm? Ugh.) But when the actual day comes around, I often miss it entirely. It just doesn’t have any meaning for me. After all, I’ve never had a valentine on Valentine’s Day.

So, I was just going to ignore Valentine’s Day. But then, this morning, I was inspired by my friend Shannon to give it a second thought. Shannon has a husband and a therefore has a valentine, but in her post today, she admits that she’s always loved Valentine’s Day for the color and the candy, even back when she was not in a relationship.

I like her attitude. I don’t like the way that this day makes some single people feel depressed and inadequate. I don’t like the thought that I can’t celebrate a holiday equally well out of a relationship as in one. I think I could learn to appreciate Valentine’s Day for my own reasons, like Shannon did. Here are some things to love about Valentine’s Day, regardless of your relationship status:

Valentine’s Day is a reason to eat candy, or cake, or cookies. I kind of stole this one from Shannon, but it can’t be ignored. On Valentine’s Day, there is chocolate everywhere! And cookies and cupcakes with pretty pink frosting! Those things have the potential to make anyone happy. Who doesn’t love a cupcake?

It’s a reason to wear cute, kitschy accessories that would otherwise be obnoxious. I’m not one to wear ugly Christmas sweaters or flag t-shirts on the 4th of July, but I will admit that today I wished that I had a pair of dangly red earrings or a scarf with hearts on it. I like reasons to dress just a little bit silly. It makes me smile. I might have to buy some Valentine’s Day accessories when they go on sale tomorrow, just so I have them for next year.

It inspires people to do something nice. Occasionally, this takes the form of admission of romantic feelings, but I think Valentine’s Day prompts people to do other little nice things, too. Several of my coworkers added a “Happy Valentine’s Day” message at the end of their emails today, sometimes in pretty red font. The running store is giving away free entries to a race based on the best answers to the question, “Why do you love running?” Not everything that happens on V-day has to do with romantic love.

Most of all, it makes me remember nice things that people did for me in the past. Even when I do think about the romantic aspects of Valentine’s Day, it’s not all bitter memories. I think of the time that my high school love interest gave me a paper flower that he made out of the program for the honors assembly we were sitting through. I remember the time that a friend from college found a perfect article for me for an assignment I was struggling with, for no particular reason except to be helpful. I remember the time that a fellow grad student complimented my necklace and sweater on a day that I felt like no one noticed anything about me but my paper grades. None of these guys had any interest in me romantically, but they still gave me valentines in their own ways. Maybe not on Valentine’s Day, but some time when it meant more.

I think about the time that Shannon told me I looked thin right after I ranted through some frustrations about work and roommates. I think of the time that my college roommate sent me an email that said, “It’s never too late to begin” while I was studying abroad and feeling like I had blown it. I think about the time just two days ago when my sister gave me half a bag of pretzel m&ms because I had been crying out of frustration, grief, and exhaustion. Those were all valentines of a sort, too.

I’ve never thought Valentine’s Day was the root of all evil, but I do admit to feeling like it was not worthy of note. I don’t feel that way any more, thanks to Shannon, and thanks to the half a bag of pretzel m&ms that this day gave me a reason to eat.

Today, I thought of the people that I love. I thought of all the ways that people show that they love me. I got emails from two of my closest friends. I got a bonus Starbucks postcard in the mail. I got to cuddle with my kitty. Granted, most of those things had nothing to do with Valentine’s Day. But I had a happy Valentine’s Day, anyway.

I hope you did, too.

Power

“Isn’t what you want (if you are so good as to think well of my character) to see me exert most power, in whatever direction? Well, this is the way I exert most.”

--from “Owen Wingrave” in The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories by Henry James

Not long after moving to Chicago, I sent out a long email to pretty much my entire address book. In it, I gave everyone my new contact information, reflected on my initial impressions of life in the city, and described my new job. At the time, I was working as an editor for a commercial publisher on a series of K-6 mathematics textbooks. It was the beginning of a career that I have come to really love.

I was surprised at how many people wrote back to me. I’m guessing that the number of was over twenty, yet I only remember one of the replies clearly. It was from the pastor of the church that I grew up attending – someone I considered a personal friend and whom I really respected. I’m sure that most of the email was very complimentary and warm, but I only really remember one piece of it. I can’t claim that this is an exact quote, but the note included something to this effect: “It was interesting to read about your job. Somehow, I think you’re called to something bigger.”

This was only one of at least five occasions—though admittedly the most hurtful—when people I trusted either insinuated or told me directly that my job was somehow beneath me. That I could do better. That I was not living up to my potential. That I had power to help people that I was throwing away. Most often, people suggested that I should consider entering religious life. Other times, they insisted that I should become a teacher. But, the point in all cases seemed to be that what I was doing was simply not good enough.

I struggled with this issue for a lot of years. Through my last two years of college, I wondered constantly if I was really meant to be a nun and I was just denying it. Six months after starting my job at the commercial publisher, I somewhat haphazardly applied to graduate schools because I felt it was what was expected of me. During graduate school, I started an application to the Peace Corps, because to do anything less felt like I was failing myself, failing God, and failing everyone who ever supported me through school.

The problem was that all of those choices made me extremely unhappy. I went to events for people considering religious life—and I cried through them. I went to graduate school—and in my second quarter, I entered what I am sure was a clinical depression. I was accepted to the Peace Corps—and knew immediately (though I couldn’t admit it to myself or anyone else right away) that to accept my assignment would be the worst mistake of my life.

Other people saw me in ways that I did not see myself. They saw me as a nun. They saw me as an academic. They saw me as a selfless volunteer in a third-world country. But I did not see myself that way. I did not see myself as anything. In an effort to please the people around me, I took their labels and tried to apply them. But it didn’t work.

In the aftermath of the latest of these debacles (that is, after declining my Peace Corps assignment when I started to apply for jobs), I found a posting on a university website for an editor of mathematics textbooks. Figuring I was qualified, I tried to apply, only to find out that teaching experience was a requirement. Because I did not have any teaching experience, the system locked me out, and no human being would ever even look at my resume. Irritated by this, I wrote an email to someone at the university whom I worked with while at the commercial publisher. He ended up writing me a letter of recommendation that, in the end, got me the job.

He sent me a copy of the letter. I will never forget reading one particular passage in it, which said the following: “She’s equal to best of your editors and superior to the rest.”

Many, many things went through my mind after I read that letter, but the one pertinent to this post is this: Wow. He sees me as an editor. And a good one. A superior one. Maybe this is an appropriate thing for me to be, after all.

I took the job a couple of weeks later, and I’ve been working as an editor on various math programs there ever since. And at the risk of sounding conceited, let me also say that over the years, I have become more and more aware that I am very good at my job. Among the best in my field. My background, my interests, and my disposition are perfectly suited to it. And I truly believe that the work that I do makes the programs better. I believe that in small ways, I make mathematics more accessible and enjoyable for kids. I believe that I make a difference.

I still think back on all the other things I could have become, sometimes. Had I chosen to enter religious life, I probably could have found a niche where I made a difference. If I had stayed in graduate school and gotten my PhD, I probably could have done some useful research. If I had used my master’s degree to get a teaching certification, I might have been able to run a moderately successful classroom. If I had gone to Kenya, I likely would have found some ways to change the lives of the people there.

But I would have been unhappy. Unsatisfied. Constantly stressed and terrified. And so there is no way I would have been at my most effective.

As an editor, I’m able to use many of my strengths to their greatest potential. And I’m left with enough time (and enough calm) on the side to engage in other activities that help other people. I could do other things that might seem to other people to be more powerful. But this is the way I best exert my powers.

I can think of two people in my life that are struggling with this issue. One just recently quit a job that made up a huge part of her identity. The other constantly feels that she should be doing more or doing better as a parent and generally as a person. To those two ladies, I just want to say this:

You’ve both made incredibly brave choices and done what was right for you. Other people may not always agree that they were the right choices, but only you know the ways in which you can best exert your power.

Now go use those powers for good. I’ll be cheering.